Harnessing the Power of Artificial Intelligence to Vitalize Endangered Indigenous Languages: Technologies and Experiences
This work addresses the preservation and revitalization of endangered Indigenous languages for affected communities, representing an incremental application of existing AI methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of endangered Indigenous languages by applying AI and NLP technologies, such as fine-tuning SOTA translators with small datasets to develop high-quality machine translators and creating Indigenous Language Models for tools like spell-checkers, with results showing effective performance despite limited data.
Since 2022 we have been exploring application areas and technologies in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) and modern Natural Language Processing (NLP), such as Large Language Models (LLMs), can be employed to foster the usage and facilitate the documentation of Indigenous languages which are in danger of disappearing. We start by discussing the decreasing diversity of languages in the world and how working with Indigenous languages poses unique ethical challenges for AI and NLP. To address those challenges, we propose an alternative development AI cycle based on community engagement and usage. Then, we report encouraging results in the development of high-quality machine learning translators for Indigenous languages by fine-tuning state-of-the-art (SOTA) translators with tiny amounts of data and discuss how to avoid some common pitfalls in the process. We also present prototypes we have built in projects done in 2023 and 2024 with Indigenous communities in Brazil, aimed at facilitating writing, and discuss the development of Indigenous Language Models (ILMs) as a replicable and scalable way to create spell-checkers, next-word predictors, and similar tools. Finally, we discuss how we envision a future for language documentation where dying languages are preserved as interactive language models.